Cap rate, real cash flow, and return on the cash you put in — including the expenses most analyses leave out. Estimate only, not investment advice.
Estimates only — not investment, tax, or legal advice. How we calculate every figure
Estimated all-in monthly payment for a home price you have in mind.
What homeowners insurance costs in your state, and whether what you pay is out of line.
Income, savings, and debts in — max home price and qualification signal out.
A rental bought for $300,000 and sold seven years later for $394,780 nets $158,925 at closing — and owes about $24,753 of federal tax, $15,273 of it on depreciation you were required to take. Here is the math, why a sale with zero appreciation still owes tax, and the three clocks a fourth-quarter sale starts.
A leveraged rental makes money three ways and cash flow is only one of them. Here is what the other two are worth — and why the structure that maximises them is a bet, not a plan.
How to verify one specific rental deal: audit the seller's pro-forma line by line, comp a real rent, reassess the tax, age the systems, and price the offer the numbers actually support.
Set up basis correctly, claim the depreciation you are owed, survive the passive-loss rules, and know what the sale will cost — with every figure tied to the statute.
Virginia guide
Every other article in this series arrives at the same conclusion by the same route: the insurance line is what decides the deal. Louisiana's premium is 3.7 times its property tax. Oklahoma's is 2.8 times. Florida's is 2.6 times.
Virginia is the exception. The statewide average premium at $300,000 of dwelling coverage is $1,858 — the lowest in this series — against a property tax bill of $3,355.08 on the statewide median house. Tax is 1.81 times insurance here, and it is 29.3% of operating expenses against insurance's 16.3%.
That inversion produces the second Virginia oddity, and it is the most instructive number in the whole series. Add up principal, interest, taxes and insurance on this article's worked example and you get $2,696.73 a month against an assumed $2,700 rent. A $3.27 surplus. The naive check that fails in every other state in this series — "does the rent cover the mortgage?" — is the one check Virginia passes.
The property still loses $731.13 a month.
Virginia is therefore the state where Section 4 matters most. Leaving out vacancy, management and capital reserves hides 82% of the annual loss here — the largest distortion of the seven states covered — precisely because the visible bills are so well behaved.
The third Virginia story is a genuine intra-state split. Hampton Roads, the Eastern Shore and the lower Chesapeake Bay counties commonly carry a separate hurricane or named-storm deductible. Inland Virginia policies frequently carry none at all. Section 2 turns that into dollars, and the gap is nearly tenfold on the same house.
A note before you start: this is general educational information about how rental property arithmetic works in Virginia. It is not investment, tax, insurance, or legal advice, and it is not a recommendation about any property. Virginia property tax is set locally by city and county, and both counties in our data carry rates well above the statewide figure. Talk to a Virginia CPA about tax treatment, a licensed Virginia insurance agent about a real quote, and a Virginia attorney about anything contractual.
Read the full Virginia guide →22 min read · Updated 2026-08-28